Meta description: Cantor plans Kalshi block-trading access for about 3,000 institutional clients, with Susquehanna providing liquidity.
Tags: Cantor Fitzgerald, Kalshi, Susquehanna, CFTC, Event Contracts
market_platform: Kalshi
category: Industry
Cantor Fitzgerald plans to give roughly 3,000 institutional clients access to large Kalshi event-contract trades, with Susquehanna providing liquidity, according to an August 20 Wall Street Journal report. The plan would put a major Wall Street broker between hedge funds, family offices and Kalshi’s federally regulated event-contract market.
The reported arrangement matters because it gives institutional clients a brokered route into event contracts without relying only on public exchange screens for size. For Cantor clients, the model described by the Journal would allow large positions tied to defined events to be negotiated with a liquidity provider, then handled through Kalshi’s regulated market structure.
What is Cantor offering clients?
Cantor is preparing to let institutional clients place large trades on Kalshi’s event contracts through a brokered block-trading framework, according to the Journal. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated designated contract market, which means its listed contracts sit inside the U.S. derivatives regulatory perimeter rather than offshore crypto-market infrastructure.
The client base described in the report includes hedge funds and family offices. Cantor’s role is the structural change: instead of a client directly placing an order into Kalshi’s public market, Cantor would broker a large trade, with Susquehanna on the other side providing prices and liquidity.
That structure resembles how large trades are handled in other derivatives markets. A block trade can reduce execution risk for a client seeking size, while still leaving the contract listed on a regulated venue. It also gives professional market makers a clearer role in a sector often associated with public-facing markets and retail participation.
Which contracts are in scope?
The Journal described the initial menu as including contracts tied to weather, commodity prices, corporate results, artificial-intelligence supply-chain disruptions and computing costs. Those categories point to a more institutional use case than headline political wagering: event contracts can isolate a business or macro risk that does not map cleanly onto a stock, bond, commodity future or insurance product.
For example, a fund with exposure to a consumer-electronics cycle may care about a specific sales threshold, not every risk embedded in a public company’s equity price. A binary contract can be structured around the event itself, while the equity market also reflects rates, valuation multiples, management guidance, buybacks, index flows and broader market sentiment.
That does not make the contracts simple. Event markets still require careful contract design, settlement rules and surveillance. The more specific the risk, the more important the listing language becomes, because a prediction contract is only as useful as the clarity of the event it resolves against.
Why is Susquehanna central to the trade?
Susquehanna brings professional derivatives-market infrastructure to the reported Cantor arrangement. Susquehanna International Group says on its own site that it created a dedicated prediction-markets desk in 2023, and Kalshi announced in April 2024 that Susquehanna had joined as an institutional market maker on the exchange.
That history helps explain why Susquehanna is the liquidity provider in the reported Cantor setup. Large clients need a counterparty that can quote size, manage risk across correlated markets and hold inventory when the other side of the trade is not immediately available. That is different from relying only on visible bids and offers from smaller traders on an exchange screen.
Susquehanna’s participation also shows how prediction markets can use more of the architecture of listed derivatives. The institutional version of the business depends less on which question is popular on a given day and more on whether brokers, market makers, exchanges and clearing processes can support repeatable risk transfer.
How does this fit Kalshi’s regulatory position?
Kalshi’s ability to attract institutional infrastructure rests heavily on its CFTC-regulated status, but its legal history is narrower than the broad claim that it simply won a fight with the regulator in 2023. The CFTC disapproved Kalshi’s congressional-control contracts on September 22, 2023, saying the contracts involved gaming and activity contrary to the public interest, according to the agency’s press release.
Kalshi sued the CFTC in November 2023. On September 6, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated the CFTC’s order. The D.C. Circuit then denied the CFTC’s emergency stay motion on October 2, 2024, according to the court’s order in KalshiEX LLC v. CFTC, No. 24-5205.
Those dates matter because they frame the industry’s current opening. Kalshi did not become institutionally relevant in a single announcement. The path ran through CFTC review, federal litigation and an appeals-court stay fight before election-related event contracts became a more serious part of the U.S. market structure debate.
Is Cantor the first broker in this market?
Cantor is not the only Wall Street-linked firm building around event contracts. Greenlight Commodities said in an April 27, 2026 press release that it brokered what it described as the first institutional prediction-market trade and identified itself as a CFTC-regulated introducing broker. Clear Street has also announced work with Kalshi.
What makes Cantor notable is its client reach and brand position in institutional fixed-income, equity and derivatives markets. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is led by co-chief executive officers Pascal Bandelier, Sage Kelly and Christian Wall, according to a February 2025 Cantor announcement about Howard Lutnick stepping down from his firm roles after his confirmation as U.S. commerce secretary.
That institutional context cuts both ways. Cantor’s involvement may help normalize event contracts for professional investors, but it also raises the standard for execution quality, disclosures, compliance controls and contract design. Institutional clients will not treat event markets as a novelty if the products are being used to hedge or transfer business risk.
Why does block trading change the market?
Block trading changes the mechanics of prediction markets because it separates institutional execution from the public order book. A hedge fund that wants a large position tied to a weather outcome or corporate metric may not want to reveal that demand by working orders gradually on screen. A brokered block lets the client negotiate price and size with a liquidity provider, then report or process the trade through the venue’s rules.
That can bring larger notional exposure into the market, but it also creates new questions. Regulators and exchanges must ensure that block trades do not disadvantage public market participants, leak information improperly or settle against poorly defined outcomes. In conventional derivatives markets, block-trade rules are built around minimum sizes, reporting windows and eligible participants.
The business incentive is straightforward. Brokers want client flow, market makers want repeatable risk-transfer opportunities, and exchanges want deeper liquidity. The public-policy question is whether event contracts tied to politics, economics, weather, corporate performance and culture can scale while staying inside the CFTC’s statutory limits.
What should the industry watch next?
The next marker is whether Cantor’s reported Kalshi access becomes a repeatable trading channel rather than a one-off institutional headline. That will depend on client demand, Susquehanna’s willingness to quote size, Kalshi’s contract pipeline and the CFTC’s approach to event-contract listings.
Competition will also matter. Polymarket has been pursuing a return to the U.S. regulatory perimeter, while Kalshi’s regulated status gives it an advantage with brokers that need a CFTC-supervised venue. If more brokers offer similar access, the market could shift toward a more recognizable derivatives stack: exchanges listing contracts, brokers distributing access and market makers warehousing risk.
For now, the concrete development is narrower than a broad prediction-market narrative. A major institutional broker is preparing to route large clients into Kalshi event contracts, and Susquehanna is set to provide liquidity. The test is whether that model produces durable institutional volume beyond the first set of weather, commodity, corporate and technology-risk contracts described in the Journal’s August 20 report.
